The Citizenship Test Poster! On sale now & with all profits going to Médecins sans Frontières, the world’s… http://fb.me/1ySOHnDU5

You can buy the poster here where “€4.50 from the sale of every poster will be donated to Rick and RTÉ 2fm’s nominated charity, Médecins sans Frontières, the world’s leading medical humanitarian organisation.”

Click on the image above to get a slightly bigger and more readable version. You’ll still have to squint a bit but it’s worth it. Well done to everyone who contributed a tweet!

Now, where’s the Cork Citizenship Test? (You knew I had to bring this up didn’t you?)

Since Google Reader doesn’t have the 3,200 post limit that Twitter has you can always get access to your old tweets, even when you go over that limit. On the downside, your Twitter account can’t be private and Google will find out yet more about you (but they probably already indexed your Twitter account anyway so no loss there!)

This is by no means an exhaustive list but if you play Bad Company 2 check out these guys and tell them Donncha sent you! Many of these people have Youtube channels too and I’ll add them later but in the meantime check out this list and of course dontrevivemebro.com.

In case you didn’t know it, you can subscribe to any WordPress.com blog through a jabber instant messaging client. Updates will appear almost quicker than they will in your browser or before you get a comment notification email!
Subscribe to this blog by entering this command:

subscribe xeer2000

Top tip for Twitter users – share your posts by going to the “My Blogs” page and clicking the Twitter checkbox.

This just in. Economists worldwide are scratching their heads as the latest figures suggest the global recession may be coming to an end. Global output has suddenly shot up, people are working harder than ever before and they’re getting out to the stores and malls and spending money.
If this trend continues the world may be on it’s way to a boom by the end of the year.

Meanwhile Twitter and Xbox Live are offline on the same day for maintenance.

As my Gravatar is used anywhere I comment, I updated that too. It’s been a while since I updated it, and it’s nice to see it’s as simple to update as before. It even stores my old Gravatar so it’ll be simple to change back at the end of the month.

I still don’t know, so I went with what I originally thought, “Tweeters”.

The Twitter Stats are generated from data I’ve collected since July 29th using my Tweet Tweet plugin for WordPress. It’s collected almost 100,000 tweets since that date. The stats are fairly basic, and they’re cached (individually) by memcached and the page itself is cached by WP Super Cache which is a good thing because it takes several seconds to generate! So far, the stats presented are:

Top 30 Twitterers

Top 30 Twitterers who repeat themselves

Top 30 friendliest Twitterers

Top 30 Twitterers who talk to me

For more interesting stats, check Tweetrush. (It’s down right now, but I presume @ajmckee and the lads are working on it and will have it running in no time at all!)

A few weeks ago Twitter annoyed a lot of European users when they stopped sending sms notifications to their users. I never really used that facility so I didn’t miss it but many Tweeters did. Outrage and blue murder were spoken of in the same sentence. People marched in the streets, there were riots.

OK, maybe not, but it annoyed a few prolific Tweeters and I wondered aloud if I could make Tweet Tweet send me sms notifications when I got replies or direct messages. After quite a bit of testing and playing around with Meteor’s website I’m glad to say I cracked it. I added hooks to my plugin for other plugins to latch on to, and wrote a small bit of code that logs in to Meteor.ie and uses their free web text to notify me of replies or direct messages.

Following on from that success, Jason Roe added code so Irish Vodafone customers could get sms notifications too!

So, if you really miss the sms notifications from Twitter, and you’re an Irish Meteor or Vodafone customer, download Tweet Tweet, install it in your WordPress blog and enjoy getting those sms notifications from Twitter again!

Developers – if your phone company isn’t covered just yet, please take a look at the existing Meteor and Vodafone plugins. The framework is there. Using curl to login and send texts can be a little daunting but it’s not impossible. Get in touch by leaving a comment here, or using the contact form on the about page.

PS. Almost forgot to mention Tweetrush went live yesterday with some very nice Twitter stats. Check out what my friend AJ has to say about the launch!
PPS. I’ll be demoing Tweet Tweet at Techludd Cork on Thursday night. If you’re there, please say hi!

I’m a big fan of Twitter. It serves as a useful tool connecting people who might never meet, and also as a vital means of communication for those who work at home or in solitary conditions.

The one huge and uncomfortable problem I see with Twitter is, “What happens to the conversation if Twitter fails?” What will you do if Twitter goes out of business tomorrow? Where will all your conversations, all the links you posted, and received from your friends be? That’s why I wrote Tweet Tweet.

Tweet Tweet is a plugin for WordPress that will archive your tweets, and the tweets of everyone you follow, plus replies you receive from strangers, and direct messages too. All these tweets will be stored safely in your database.

There is a simple “review pane” where you can see the latest tweets and go back in history but it’s very basic. The primary aim of this plugin is to ensure that your conversations are safe.

The plugin has been tested by a number of users, but it uses jQuery and AJAX techniques for the review pane so I’d love to hear if it works for you.

Please, do not hack the plugin to poll Twitter more than once every 90 seconds. Unless you follow thousands of others, 90 seconds will be fine. I have mine set to 180 seconds and it picks up every single tweet.

Update! I just tagged version 0.2 which adds a better hover for the review pane (and makes it IE6 compatible), and also adds a search form to make it easier to navigate your Tweet archive.

The Golden Compass
First of a three part fantasy/sci-fi series. Some people hate it because of it's anti God message but it's a great read. I found it hard to put down. There's even a Snopes article about the film adaptation.